The colour scheme for the wind speed graph appears to assign cool colours to low speeds and hot colours to high speeds. Since 9999 knots is a yellowish-orange, I guess it must be considered a moderately high speed.

The really WTF is the smiling moon on a field of stars. Those stars are right where the shadowed side of the moon should be. There won't be any light there unless it's on the surface of the moon or between the moon and Earth.

This moon and star symbolism is used in lots of places and I cringe every time I see it. Does everybody else think that a crescent moon results from the rest of the moon being eaten by a giant space goat?

It turns out there is a way to define negative temperature. If you start with statistical mechanics and use that to build up the concept of temperature (instead of just assuming it, like you do in thermodynamics), the stat mech definition can include negative numbers.

However, because of how it's put together (and I'd have to go dig up my notes, it's been a couple years--it has to do with having a 'population inversion' where you've set up a situation where you are way out of line with what could happen normally), negative temperatures end up being insanely hot.

The second one is a screen shot at 240x320, you don't suppose it's a PDA do you? You try designing a GUI for a PDA and let me know how you turn out.

Ah yes, the "it's difficult" excuse.

"It's difficult to do this correctly, so that excuses the fact that it doesn't work!"

Sort of like how because I don't personally know how to design a car, I can't be upset if my brakes fail, causing me to drive into a tree. Before being able to complain about intermittent brake failure, I have to actually design and build a car from scratch.

The really WTF is the smiling moon on a field of stars. Those stars are right where the shadowed side of the moon should be. There won't be any light there unless it's on the surface of the moon or between the moon and Earth.

This moon and star symbolism is used in lots of places and I cringe every time I see it. Does everybody else think that a crescent moon results from the rest of the moon being eaten by a giant space goat?

For example, if you put a pressure gauge on your tire and it reads 0, your tire pressure is actually 101.3 kpa (14.7 psi).

Normal tire pressure of 32 psi is actually 46.7 psi.

A negative pressure would be possible down to -101.3 kPa on this scale, but you can't go any lower than a perfect vacuum. The actual value of your "absolute relative zero" (nice phrase) depends on what "zero" you pick.

Remember, there's no such thing as suction, it's actually air from the high pressure area blowing into the low pressure area.

Actually, the first image isn't a WTF as presented. All 9s indicates missing data for that field (in this case, every field, indicating that the station missed an hourly report). Data is sent to NOAA as an ASCII flat file, so you can just imagine the kinds of WTFs committed in the sending of crucial meteorological data. God, I love the government.

The real WTF here is that the US _still_ hasn't adopted the metric system.

So true!

I joked about this today (I work at a civil engineering company). Our DOT requires metric plans...and the engineers were complaining. "It's Complicated," they'd say. You're an idiot, I'd reply. "I much prefer the English system," another would say. The English don't prefer the English system, says I.

Then the kicker...a guy with questionable talents says "But I'm used to dividing everything up into 12. Dividing things into 10s slows me down." We all just stared at him -- some mouths open, some people trying to hold back the snickers.

Engineering Scales are all measured in tenths of a foot. Now we all know why his grading plans are off.